The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is a federal public health agency under the umbrella of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) based in Atlanta, Georgia. The agency's mission is to prevent harm to human health and diminished quality of life from exposure to hazardous substances found at waste sites, in unplanned releases, and in other sources of pollution present in the environment. ATSDR identifies communities where people might be exposed to hazardous substances in the environment, but as far as investigations go, ATSDR cannot enforce any regulations by closing down a plant or other business, it can only make recommendations to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The ATSDR has worked on a variety of different cases and projects, including aiding New York City in establishing a registry to assess short and long term health effects from the World Trade Center collapse, sampling the dust and air after the collapse of the World Trade Center, testing the water and soil at Camp Pendleton for lead, copper and other chemicals, as well as monitoring the effects of asbestos and identifying sites that have high concentrations of it.

The discovery of contamination in New York State’s Love Canal during the 1970s first brought the problem of hazardous wastes to national attention. Similarly, the health threat from sudden chemical releases came into focus in December 1984, when a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas released from a Union Carbide facility in Bhopal, India, killed approximately 8,000 people and permanently disabled another 50,000. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as Superfund, was enacted by Congress on December 11, 1980. This law created a tax on the chemical and petroleum industries and provided broad Federal authority to respond directly to releases or threatened releases of hazardous substances that could endanger public health or the environment.

The ATSDR has the responsibility of identifying harmful and toxic substances in the environment. This usually entails measuring the threat of a specific substance and informing the public about how to stay safe and unexposed, while at the same time making recommendations to the Environmental Protection Agency for removal of the waste. Unlike the Environmental Protection Agency, ATSDR is not a regulatory agency. ATSDR is a public health agency that advises EPA on the health aspects of hazardous waste sites or spills. ATSDR makes recommendations to the EPA when specific actions are needed to protect the public's health. For example, ATSDR might recommend providing an alternative water supply, removing contaminated material, or restricting access to a site. EPA usually follows these recommendations. However, ATSDR cannot require EPA to follow its recommendations.

In certain aspects ATSDR is similar to poison control in that it has toxicologists and other health specialists on technical telephone duty everyday, and an emergency response team to provide technical assistance for health-related problems caused by toxic chemical spills or releases of hazardous substances.

The following are sample FY 2006 successes for ATSDR:

Helped thousands of returning residents in Mississippi and Louisiana re-enter their homes safely following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita; (see controversies)

Advanced asthma research through a study in New York that found a link between exposures to particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, ozone, nitrous oxide, and other pollutants with asthma emergency department visits;

Helped stop mercury exposures to preschool children at a Franklin Township, New Jersey, day-care center run for two years in a building once occupied by a medical instruments manufacturer; and

Protected the health of people in Connecticut and Indiana living near chemical facilities that caught fire by helping to ensure safe cleanup and re-occupancy.

Programs

Board of Scientific Counselors (BSC)

The Board provides advice and guidance to the Secretary of Health and Human Services; the Director of CDC; and the Director of ATSDR. The advice given pertains to program goals, objectives, strategies, and priorities, as well as providing external peer review of ATSDR programs. The BSC’s advice and guidance assists ATSDR in ensuring scientific quality, timeliness, utility, and dissemination of results.

This project provides educational resources for people concerned about past exposure to radioactive iodine (I-131) released from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington. People who lived near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation were exposed to various types of radiation, especially during the years 1944–1957. Scientists from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry have been evaluating the potential health effects that may have resulted from those exposures. Their data show a small increased risk for certain men to develop a thyroid disease. The project's goal is to assist concerned individuals and their health care providers in making informed health care choices concerning these exposures.

This is a series of self-instructional publications designed to increase primary care provider's knowledge of hazardous substances in the environment and to aid in the evaluation of potentially exposed patients.

Cluster

This is softwear ATSDR has made available to help the researcher determine if there is a statistically significant chance that a cluster of symptoms occurred other than by random phenomena. This softwear uses 12 statistical methods that analyze the significance of a cluster from techniques that evaluate time, space, and both time and space clustering.

The ATSDR ToxFAQs™ is a series of summaries about hazardous substances developed by the ATSDR Division of Toxicology. Answers are provided to the most frequently asked questions about exposure to hazardous substances found around hazardous waste sites and the effects of exposure on human health.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the ATSDR are responsible for creating this list. This priority list is not a list of "most toxic" substances, but rather a prioritization of substances based on a combination of their frequency, toxicity, and potential for human exposure.

The ATSDR failed to blow the whistle on the safety of FEMA trailers before many children and adults were affected by carcinogenic formaldehyde. The chemical, used in interior glue, was detected in many of the 143,000 trailers sent to the Gulf Coast in 2006. But a push to get residents out of them, spearheaded by FEMA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did not begin until February 2008. Residents of the FEMA trailers reported breathing difficulties, persistent flu-like symptoms, eye irritation, and nosebleeds. Tests on a number of FEMA trailers by the Sierra Club showed that 83% had levels of formaldehyde in the indoor air at levels above the Environmental Protection Agency recommended limit.

On April 1, 2008, the House Committee on Science and Technology's Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight held hearings into how and why the agency failed to protect public health when those trailers were found to be emitting dangerous levels of formaldehyde. At the hearing, it became clear that Dr. Christopher De Rosa a leading government expert on formaldehyde, had tried to alert his superiors about the toxicity levels of the government trailers in New Orleans, but was repeatedly ignored. Ultimately, he was demoted. His superiors later admitted that they should have followed his advice, but they did not address why they "reassigned" him to a new position.

In 2003 the ATSDR listed mercury as the third most hazardous substance to human health behind arsenic and lead. Studies comparing environmental mercury exposure to autism are rare, but there has been research into the correlation between the use of thimerosal in vaccines and autism. Thimerosal is a mercury-based vaccine preservative. The CDC and National Institutes of Health in 2000 commissioned the Institute of Medicine to establish an independent Immunization Safety Review Committee to evaluate vaccine safety, including any possible links between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and thimerosal. The committee's final report, released in 2004 found that neither thimerosal nor the MMR vaccine was related to autism and urged future autism research be directed away from the topic. However, thimerosal and vaccine opponents decried the study as biased because they said the CDC and health institutes, pro-vaccination agencies, funded both the study and the research of many of the committee's members. The National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit Virginia-based organization advocating for immunization reform, questioned the committee's objectivity.

Christopher J. Portier, who has thirty years of relevant, high-level experience under his belt, took over as director of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) on August 2, 2010. ATSDR is a federal public health agency under the umbrella of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) based in Atlanta, Georgia. The agency’s mission is to prevent harm to human health and diminished quality of life from exposure to hazardous substances found at waste sites, in unplanned releases, and in other sources of pollution present in the environment. ATSDR identifies communities where people might be exposed to hazardous substances in the environment, but ATSDR cannot enforce any regulations by closing down a plant or other business; it can only make recommendations to the Environmental Protection Agency.

A Louisianan of Cajun ancestry, Dr. Portier earned his BSc degree in mathematics at Nicholls State University in 1977, and his MS and PhD degrees in biostatistics at the University of North Carolina in 1979 and 1981, respectively. He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, 30 book chapters, and 40 technical reports.

From 1978 to 2010, Portier worked at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, advancing to that agency’s leadership ranks. From 1978 to 1990, Portier was a Mathematical Statistician at NIEHS; from 1990 to 1993, he was Head of the Risk Methodology Section; from 1993 to 2005, he was Chief of the Laboratory of Computational Biology and Risk Analysis, including serving a stint from 1996 to 2000 as Associate Director for Risk Assessment, and a tour from 2000 to 2006 as Director of the Environmental Toxicology Program and Associate Director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP). Finally, from 2006 to December 2009, Portier served as Director of the Office of Risk Assessment Research and Associate Director of NIEHS, after which he spent a six-month sabbatical as a guest of the National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

Portier is an expert in the design, analysis, and interpretation of environmental health data. His research efforts and interests include such diverse topics as cancer biology, risk assessment, climate change, bioinformatics, immunology, neurodevelopment, genetically modified foods, and genomics. He has contributed to the development of cancer risk assessment guidelines for national and international agencies. He led the U.S. evaluation of electromagnetic fields by national and international scientists, which was the first comprehensive review in this field. Portier directed the efforts of the U.S. government to develop a collaborative research agenda with Vietnam on the health effects of Agent Orange used by the U.S. against that country.

A Democrat, since 2007 Portier has contributed $1,550 to Democratic candidates and causes, including $500 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, $250 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and $300 to the Democratic National Committee.

Dr. Howard Frumkin served as director of the ATSDR from September 2005 until January 15, 2010, when he was transferred after extended criticism ot the agency's handling of formaldehyde-contaminated trailers that the government provided to Hurricane Katrina victims.. He also currently serves on the Institute of Medicine Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research and Medicine.

Frumkin was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. He received his B.A. from Brown University, his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and his MPH and DrPH from Harvard.

Frumkin has served on the board of directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility, as president of the Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics and as chair of the Science Board of the American Public Health Association. He has also served as a consultant to several corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Southwire, Georgia Power, and Polaroid, and to several unions, including the Chemical Workers Association and the Utility Workers Union.

Prior to 2005, Frumkin held several teaching positions, including professor and chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta and Professor of Medicine at Emory Medical School. He founded and directed Emory’s Environmental and Occupational Medicine Consultation Clinic and the Southeast Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is a federal public health agency under the umbrella of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) based in Atlanta, Georgia. The agency's mission is to prevent harm to human health and diminished quality of life from exposure to hazardous substances found at waste sites, in unplanned releases, and in other sources of pollution present in the environment. ATSDR identifies communities where people might be exposed to hazardous substances in the environment, but as far as investigations go, ATSDR cannot enforce any regulations by closing down a plant or other business, it can only make recommendations to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The ATSDR has worked on a variety of different cases and projects, including aiding New York City in establishing a registry to assess short and long term health effects from the World Trade Center collapse, sampling the dust and air after the collapse of the World Trade Center, testing the water and soil at Camp Pendleton for lead, copper and other chemicals, as well as monitoring the effects of asbestos and identifying sites that have high concentrations of it.

The discovery of contamination in New York State’s Love Canal during the 1970s first brought the problem of hazardous wastes to national attention. Similarly, the health threat from sudden chemical releases came into focus in December 1984, when a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas released from a Union Carbide facility in Bhopal, India, killed approximately 8,000 people and permanently disabled another 50,000. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as Superfund, was enacted by Congress on December 11, 1980. This law created a tax on the chemical and petroleum industries and provided broad Federal authority to respond directly to releases or threatened releases of hazardous substances that could endanger public health or the environment.

The ATSDR has the responsibility of identifying harmful and toxic substances in the environment. This usually entails measuring the threat of a specific substance and informing the public about how to stay safe and unexposed, while at the same time making recommendations to the Environmental Protection Agency for removal of the waste. Unlike the Environmental Protection Agency, ATSDR is not a regulatory agency. ATSDR is a public health agency that advises EPA on the health aspects of hazardous waste sites or spills. ATSDR makes recommendations to the EPA when specific actions are needed to protect the public's health. For example, ATSDR might recommend providing an alternative water supply, removing contaminated material, or restricting access to a site. EPA usually follows these recommendations. However, ATSDR cannot require EPA to follow its recommendations.

In certain aspects ATSDR is similar to poison control in that it has toxicologists and other health specialists on technical telephone duty everyday, and an emergency response team to provide technical assistance for health-related problems caused by toxic chemical spills or releases of hazardous substances.

The following are sample FY 2006 successes for ATSDR:

Helped thousands of returning residents in Mississippi and Louisiana re-enter their homes safely following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita; (see controversies)

Advanced asthma research through a study in New York that found a link between exposures to particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, ozone, nitrous oxide, and other pollutants with asthma emergency department visits;

Helped stop mercury exposures to preschool children at a Franklin Township, New Jersey, day-care center run for two years in a building once occupied by a medical instruments manufacturer; and

Protected the health of people in Connecticut and Indiana living near chemical facilities that caught fire by helping to ensure safe cleanup and re-occupancy.

Programs

Board of Scientific Counselors (BSC)

The Board provides advice and guidance to the Secretary of Health and Human Services; the Director of CDC; and the Director of ATSDR. The advice given pertains to program goals, objectives, strategies, and priorities, as well as providing external peer review of ATSDR programs. The BSC’s advice and guidance assists ATSDR in ensuring scientific quality, timeliness, utility, and dissemination of results.

This project provides educational resources for people concerned about past exposure to radioactive iodine (I-131) released from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington. People who lived near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation were exposed to various types of radiation, especially during the years 1944–1957. Scientists from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry have been evaluating the potential health effects that may have resulted from those exposures. Their data show a small increased risk for certain men to develop a thyroid disease. The project's goal is to assist concerned individuals and their health care providers in making informed health care choices concerning these exposures.

This is a series of self-instructional publications designed to increase primary care provider's knowledge of hazardous substances in the environment and to aid in the evaluation of potentially exposed patients.

Cluster

This is softwear ATSDR has made available to help the researcher determine if there is a statistically significant chance that a cluster of symptoms occurred other than by random phenomena. This softwear uses 12 statistical methods that analyze the significance of a cluster from techniques that evaluate time, space, and both time and space clustering.

The ATSDR ToxFAQs™ is a series of summaries about hazardous substances developed by the ATSDR Division of Toxicology. Answers are provided to the most frequently asked questions about exposure to hazardous substances found around hazardous waste sites and the effects of exposure on human health.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the ATSDR are responsible for creating this list. This priority list is not a list of "most toxic" substances, but rather a prioritization of substances based on a combination of their frequency, toxicity, and potential for human exposure.

The ATSDR failed to blow the whistle on the safety of FEMA trailers before many children and adults were affected by carcinogenic formaldehyde. The chemical, used in interior glue, was detected in many of the 143,000 trailers sent to the Gulf Coast in 2006. But a push to get residents out of them, spearheaded by FEMA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did not begin until February 2008. Residents of the FEMA trailers reported breathing difficulties, persistent flu-like symptoms, eye irritation, and nosebleeds. Tests on a number of FEMA trailers by the Sierra Club showed that 83% had levels of formaldehyde in the indoor air at levels above the Environmental Protection Agency recommended limit.

On April 1, 2008, the House Committee on Science and Technology's Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight held hearings into how and why the agency failed to protect public health when those trailers were found to be emitting dangerous levels of formaldehyde. At the hearing, it became clear that Dr. Christopher De Rosa a leading government expert on formaldehyde, had tried to alert his superiors about the toxicity levels of the government trailers in New Orleans, but was repeatedly ignored. Ultimately, he was demoted. His superiors later admitted that they should have followed his advice, but they did not address why they "reassigned" him to a new position.

In 2003 the ATSDR listed mercury as the third most hazardous substance to human health behind arsenic and lead. Studies comparing environmental mercury exposure to autism are rare, but there has been research into the correlation between the use of thimerosal in vaccines and autism. Thimerosal is a mercury-based vaccine preservative. The CDC and National Institutes of Health in 2000 commissioned the Institute of Medicine to establish an independent Immunization Safety Review Committee to evaluate vaccine safety, including any possible links between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and thimerosal. The committee's final report, released in 2004 found that neither thimerosal nor the MMR vaccine was related to autism and urged future autism research be directed away from the topic. However, thimerosal and vaccine opponents decried the study as biased because they said the CDC and health institutes, pro-vaccination agencies, funded both the study and the research of many of the committee's members. The National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit Virginia-based organization advocating for immunization reform, questioned the committee's objectivity.

Christopher J. Portier, who has thirty years of relevant, high-level experience under his belt, took over as director of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) on August 2, 2010. ATSDR is a federal public health agency under the umbrella of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) based in Atlanta, Georgia. The agency’s mission is to prevent harm to human health and diminished quality of life from exposure to hazardous substances found at waste sites, in unplanned releases, and in other sources of pollution present in the environment. ATSDR identifies communities where people might be exposed to hazardous substances in the environment, but ATSDR cannot enforce any regulations by closing down a plant or other business; it can only make recommendations to the Environmental Protection Agency.

A Louisianan of Cajun ancestry, Dr. Portier earned his BSc degree in mathematics at Nicholls State University in 1977, and his MS and PhD degrees in biostatistics at the University of North Carolina in 1979 and 1981, respectively. He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, 30 book chapters, and 40 technical reports.

From 1978 to 2010, Portier worked at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, advancing to that agency’s leadership ranks. From 1978 to 1990, Portier was a Mathematical Statistician at NIEHS; from 1990 to 1993, he was Head of the Risk Methodology Section; from 1993 to 2005, he was Chief of the Laboratory of Computational Biology and Risk Analysis, including serving a stint from 1996 to 2000 as Associate Director for Risk Assessment, and a tour from 2000 to 2006 as Director of the Environmental Toxicology Program and Associate Director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP). Finally, from 2006 to December 2009, Portier served as Director of the Office of Risk Assessment Research and Associate Director of NIEHS, after which he spent a six-month sabbatical as a guest of the National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

Portier is an expert in the design, analysis, and interpretation of environmental health data. His research efforts and interests include such diverse topics as cancer biology, risk assessment, climate change, bioinformatics, immunology, neurodevelopment, genetically modified foods, and genomics. He has contributed to the development of cancer risk assessment guidelines for national and international agencies. He led the U.S. evaluation of electromagnetic fields by national and international scientists, which was the first comprehensive review in this field. Portier directed the efforts of the U.S. government to develop a collaborative research agenda with Vietnam on the health effects of Agent Orange used by the U.S. against that country.

A Democrat, since 2007 Portier has contributed $1,550 to Democratic candidates and causes, including $500 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, $250 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and $300 to the Democratic National Committee.

Dr. Howard Frumkin served as director of the ATSDR from September 2005 until January 15, 2010, when he was transferred after extended criticism ot the agency's handling of formaldehyde-contaminated trailers that the government provided to Hurricane Katrina victims.. He also currently serves on the Institute of Medicine Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research and Medicine.

Frumkin was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. He received his B.A. from Brown University, his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and his MPH and DrPH from Harvard.

Frumkin has served on the board of directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility, as president of the Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics and as chair of the Science Board of the American Public Health Association. He has also served as a consultant to several corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Southwire, Georgia Power, and Polaroid, and to several unions, including the Chemical Workers Association and the Utility Workers Union.

Prior to 2005, Frumkin held several teaching positions, including professor and chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta and Professor of Medicine at Emory Medical School. He founded and directed Emory’s Environmental and Occupational Medicine Consultation Clinic and the Southeast Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit.